Hackers and cyber criminals are becoming dramatically more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day.

While other operating systems are more widely in use, cybercriminals have now shifted from traditional activities to more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors, support for cross platforms and low detection rates.

Security researchers have discovered that infamous Adwind, a popular cross-platform Remote Access Trojan written in Java, has re-emerged and currently being used to "target enterprises in the aerospace industry, with Switzerland, Austria, Ukraine, and the US the most affected countries."

Adwind — also known as AlienSpy, Frutas, jFrutas, Unrecom, Sockrat, JSocket, and jRat — has been in development since 2013 and is capable of infecting all the major operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
Adwind has several malicious capabilities including stealing credentials, keylogging, taking pictures or screenshots, data gathering and exfiltrate data. The trojan can even turn infected machines into botnets to abuse them for destructing online services by carrying out DDoS attacks.

Researchers from Trend Micro recently noticed a sudden rise in the number of Adwind infections during June 2017 — at least 117,649 instances in the wild, which is 107 percent more than the previous month.

According to a blog post published today, the malicious campaign was noticed on two different occasions.

First was observed on June 7 and used a link to divert victims to their .NET-written malware equipped with spyware capabilities, while the second wave was noticed on June 14 and used different domains hosting their malware and command-and-control servers.

Both waves eventually employed a similar social engineering tactic to trick victims into clicking the malicious links within a spam email that impersonate the chair of the Mediterranean Yacht Broker Association (MYBA) Charter Committee.

Once infected, the malware also collects system's fingerprints, along with the list of installed antivirus and firewall applications.

"It can also perform reflection, a dynamic code generation in Java. The latter is a particularly useful feature in Java that enables developers/programmers to dynamically inspect, call, and instantiate attributes and classes at runtime. In cybercriminal hands, it can be abused to evade static analysis from traditional antivirus (AV) solutions," the researchers wrote.

My advice for users to remain protected from such malware is always to be suspicious of uninvited documents sent over an email and never click on links inside those documents unless verifying the source.

Additionally, keep your systems and antivirus products up-to-date in order to protect against any latest threat.